He'd agreed to run under one condition: He would not, under any circumstances, miss any of his daughter's high-school basketball games.

So it was that on the Friday before Election Day, Dominick Ianno, then the executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, found himself shuttling then-state Rep. Brown between Boston and two different suburbs so Brown could wedge in a basketball game between two final campaign debates.

He did it with the same style he displayed by taking that state Senate seat in 2004, and a state House seat six years before that: With a relentless energy and blue-collar sensibility that belied his decidedly upper-middle class lifestyle.

Today, at his first post-election press conference, the man who ran on a promise to block President Obama's health care bill vowed to be an independent voice -- a "Scott Brown Republican," he said, echoing a common campaign refrain.

"I've already made it very, very clear that I'm not beholden to anybody," Brown said. "I've been asked many times what kind of Republican I would be, and I really didn't know how to answer that. So I said I'm going to be a Scott Brown Republican… maybe there's a new breed of Republican coming to Washington."

GOP Eager for Scott Brown's Conservative Brand

Many national Republicans, anxious for a fresh face for the party, wouldn't mind that one bit. Within minutes of Brown's victory last night, The Drudge Report bannered a headline speculating about a 2012 presidential candidacy.

Prominent GOP officials, thrilled with the upset victory, proclaimed Brown to be something of a template for the candidacies they hope to run in 2010.

"No one believed it was possible -- especially in the bluest of blue states," National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn, R-Texas, wrote in a memo today. "But the political naysayers who discounted Brown's candidacy and anointed Democrat Martha Coakley after she won her party's nomination miscalculated one important factor: Voters' utter dissatisfaction with the status quo."

Before catapulting himself to national attention over the race's final two weeks, Brown was perhaps best known for a few pieces of tabloid-ready trivia.

Though he shares a home state with a once and possibly future presidential contender, former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., his rise more closely resembles that of Sarah Palin, an aw-shucks populist who tapped into voter anger and frustration aimed at Washington.